"Well, I don't expect we'll be long...."

They crossed the lawn, their short shadows treading it more gaily than
their tall, striding selves. There seemed to be some mishap at the gate
into the orchard. Apparently Roger squeezed his finger in the hinge; but
he was very brave. The two women stood at the window and watched him hop
about, shaking the injured hand, while his shadow parodied him, and
Richard waited with a stoop of the shoulders that meant patience and
hatred. Then again the silver garden was empty.

Poppy and Ellen went and sat down at the hearth; and Poppy said with an
extravagant bitterness: "Well, that's that. He knows as well as I do
that the Army expects us officers to be in by eleven."

"No doubt Mr. Yaverland'll go round in the morning and explain the
exceptional circumstances," murmured Ellen.

"I'm sure I don't care. I'm fed to the teeth with the Army, fed to the
teeth...." She stared into the fire as if she saw a picture there, and
drew a little tin box from her pocket and offered it to Ellen, saying:
"Take one. They're violet cachous." Sucking one, she sat forward with
her feet in the fender and her head near her knees until, as if the
flavour of the sweet in her mouth was reminding her of a time when life
was less flavourless than now, she started up and began to walk
restlessly about the room. She halted at the window and asked thickly:
"That place over the other side of the river. Where there's a glow in
the sky. Is that Chatham?"

With awe, with the lifting of the hair, the chilling of the skin that
those suffer who see the fulfilment of a prophecy, Ellen remembered
what Marion had said that afternoon about the handsome young sailor in
Chatham High Street. She murmured tremulously: "I think Richard said it
was."

"Ah, Chatham's a nice place," said Poppy in a surly voice. She pressed
her face against the glass like a beast looking out of its cage. It was
quite certain, as the silence endured, that she wept.

Then Marion had been right. A wave of terror washed over Ellen. What
chance had she of playing any part on a stage where there moved this
woman of genius, who was so creative that she had made Richard, and so
wise that she could see through the brick wall of this girl's
brutishness? She stammered, "Well, good-night, I'll away to my bed," and
ran upstairs to her room and undressed furiously, letting her clothes
fall here and there on the floor. In the first moments after she turned